Posts Tagged ‘Farming’

I think the question is: where do you the eater want your food to come from? A farm or a factory?

If the answer is farm, put down your fork and ask this question aloud:

Where did my food come from?

Then, go to an urban farm, community garden, working farm, or farmers’ market and ask the growers the following:

How do I either grow the food that I eat or how can I help you grow the food that we eat?

This is the beginning. This is the beginning of the food justice movement started by the people. The people that eat and grow the food. Join together and stop shopping, stop eating factory food, and start farming together. Start growing our food. Find out who your community organizers are and then help them get better organized. Demand farmers’ markets in every neighborhood. Ask for what you and your community need. Not tomorrow but today. Start fighting and fight hard and don’t stop until everyone, and I mean everyone is given, or has asked for, or demanded the freshest, healthiest local food that our bodies, all of our bodies, and minds, and spirits deserve and need in order to function and survive and thrive.

This is where the movement begins . The movement begins with the people. With our people. With us.

Okay, I hope to write more about this next weekend, but I did want to go ahead and write a little bit about my first day of working on the farm in Red Hook, Brooklyn. I just signed up for a work share which means if I work two hours every Saturday, then I get to take home a full share’s worth of vegetables, fruit, and eggs. A pretty rewarding amount of food for a few hours of work.

My day began at ten in the morning composting with Jeff and another volunteer. The other volunteer and I raked layers of compost materials, sawdust, and chicken manure in the compost pile. The smell was brutal and unrelenting and stuck with me for a full 24 hours. I think I was being hazed on my first day at the farm. I wasn’t ready to give up yet and even decided that the next Saturday I would bring home my own two and a half gallon compost bucket and give this composting thing a shot. I will just have to keep in mind to use food scraps like banana peels, orange rinds, egg shells, coffee grinds, and the like.

After composting (which I actually really enjoyed except for the smell), it was off to weeding with a few other volunteers. Once I got started pulling weeds on a row of collard greens and kale, it was tough to stop, and I stuck it out the whole way down the row. It felt good to be in the dirt and working hard on the farm. If I had been paying attention, I might have noticed my t-shirt not meeting my shorts in the middle of the very hot summer day. I was too busy chatting and weeding and thinking about picking up my CSA bounty at the end of my shift.

At the end of the day, I took home my fabulous share of eggplant, beets, collard greens, corn, cherry tomatoes, basil, edamame, jalapenos, garlic, peaches, and apricots. (I also took home a nice strip of sunburn on my back which I didn’t notice until hours later when I was too tired to care.) I’ll get to take home eggs next week.